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Censorship in Black and White

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Censorship in Black and White University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Publications 3-2013 Censorship in Black and White: The Burning Cross (1947), Band of Angels (1957) and the Politics of Film Censorship in the American South after World War II Melissa Ooten University of Richmond, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/wgss-faculty-publications Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Ooten, Melissa. "Censorship in Black and White: The Burning Cross (1947), Band of Angels (1957) and the Politics of Film Censorship in the American South after World War II." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33, no. 1 (March 2013): 77-98. doi:10.1080/ 01439685.2013.764719. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CENSORSHIP IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN RACIAL HIERARCHIES AT THE MOVIES, 1920s-1930s Melissa Ooten In 1806, Richmond entrepreneurs built the city’s first theater, the New Theater, at the present-day juncture of Thirteenth and Broad streets. This theater was likely the first in Virginia, and Richmonders of all colors, classes, and genders attended, although a three-tiered system of seating and ticket pricing separated attendees by race and class. Wealthy white patrons paid a dollar or more to sit in boxes thoroughly separated from the rest of the audience. Their middle and working class counterparts paid two or three quarters for orchestra seating. For a quarter or less, the city’s poorest citizens, any people of color, free or slave, and women “alone in public,” who were considered prostitutes, filled the theater’s pit and upper-most galleries. 1 On the night of December 26, 1811, over 600 patrons, including Virginia’s governor, George W. Smith, crowded into the theater. During that night’s performance, a fire broke out, killing 72 people. Of the dead, fifty were well-dressed, upper-class white women, who had either been caught in the upper-tiers of the theater in cumbersome dresses or killed by the stampeding crowd. Twenty were African Americans trapped in the uppermost reaches of the theater. 2 Each theatergoer’s class, race, and gender dictated the space he or she occupied in the theater that night and thus determined his or her likelihood of leaving the venue alive. While the advent of cinema would not reach Virginia for another century, the space of the movie theater would still be stratified by class, race, and gender – and in many ways, theater space would become even more impermeable. By the twentieth century, more rigid boundaries governed theater space as the advent of legal racial segregation regulated black moviegoers entirely out of white spaces or to the balconies where their presence would be rendered least visible to white attendees. And once patrons took their seats, the images they saw, especially ones of white women and all people of color, would be regulated as well. In 1922, Virginia’s General Assembly passed legislation to create a Motion Picture Censorship Board to view every movie seeking legal exhibition in the state. As a result of this law, all movies would be screened and judged by a three-person censorship panel before being exhibited publically in Virginia. Controlling what African Americans saw on-screen and controlling what sorts of depictions of African Americans all moviegoers viewed at the movies became central to the censorship board’s mission. In the end, censors regulated out of the movies images of African Americans that suggested they be granted greater citizenship rights and depictions of scenes in which African Americans actually demanded basic civil rights. By sanitizing scenes of African Americans and only allowing the most caricatured, non-threatening images on-screen, white censors promoted the greater state project of extolling a façade of amicable race relations, with politically-empowered whites supposedly protecting African Americans by curtailing their basic economic and political rights. This cultural regulation of popular culture complemented other economic and political policies of the state designed to buttress the power of white, middle-to-upper class elites within the state. During the latter third of the nineteenth century, thirty-three African Americans served on Richmond’s city council. Many black citizens throughout Virginia could vote, although the beginning of the twentieth century severely curtailed this right. In 1900, over 6,400 black men in Richmond could vote. With the passing of the 1902 state constitution, which included several new and potent voting restrictions such as a poll tax of $4.50, age, residency, literacy, property, and veteran requirements, only 760 black Richmonders remained eligible to vote, and city officials gerrymandered the vibrant African-American neighborhood of Jackson Ward out of political vitality. 3 Despite the suffocation of such Jim Crow practices, African American activists negotiated daily boundaries to claim certain rights, especially public utility services within the city. In the 1910s and 1920s, these demands grew as NAACP leaders organized community meetings to discuss issues of school segregation and disfranchisement, and the Black press, particular John Mitchell Jr’s Richmond Planet , which mounted intense publicity campaigns against lynching. It is into this contestation and negotiation between African Americans and white officials over basic rights that movie censorship fell. For elite, state officials, movie censorship offered the possibility of acting as the cultural arm of the regulation of boundaries between blacks and whites on the movie screen that would accompany other legal and economic boundaries aimed at separating the races and classifying individuals strictly to one race or the other. Racial hierarchy, as historian Lisa Dorr has noted, functioned as the main social hierarchy in the South at the time, with whites openly acknowledging and publicly defending it. 4 While Virginia’s 1902 constitution disfranchised the vast majority of African American voters, the Assembly did not pass laws forbidding integrated seating at all functions until 1926 and did not segregate seating on public transportation until 1932, although custom had previously dictated segregation in most of these places. 5 It was African American activists’ continued challenges to these de facto segregated spaces that led to their de jure segregation. By the 1920s, five Richmond theaters welcomed African Americans, and a handful of white theaters offered balcony-only segregated seating for Black patrons by the latter half of the decade. 6 And it was the portrayal of race relations on-screen and whether films would be limited to “white-only” theaters that factored into many of the censors’ decisions. After all, the censorship of film in Virginia became a key way for white elites to regulate the state’s racial order. RACIAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY VIRGINIA In early twentieth-century Virginia, state officials presented Virginia as modern, economically progressive, and morally clean as a means of attracting more industry and business into Virginia. To this end, the General Assembly passed statutes governing film exhibition, eugenics, interracial marriage, and definitions of “whiteness” in the state. 7 Officials argued that no changes needed to be made to the state’s racial hierarchy while simultaneously using legislation to more strictly regulate the racial order through legal codes. For example, legislators passed legislation that regulated the sexuality of citizens of color and poor whites through eugenics-oriented programs by touting its economic benefit to the state. Officials used terms such as “clean” and “progressive” to describe the Virginia they envisioned as a modern locale filled with thriving new businesses and industries filling the state’s treasury. Through specific legislative initiatives in the early 1920s— the movie censorship law, the Racial Integrity Act (which defined the parameters of whiteness), and the sterilization act (which resulted in the sterilization of over 8,000 poor Virginians)—Virginia’s lawmakers successfully constructed certain races and sexual behaviors as dangers to the state and labeled specific “unclean” citizens as destructive to the state’s economy. 8 Yet the censorship law stood as a stark exception to other legislation. Unlike the laws affecting marginalized populations—the poor of all races and all people of color—movie censorship affected everyone. As historian Pippa Holloway writes, “all Virginians could have their freedom of speech threatened by a censorship board.” 9 Government officials rationalized their intervention into citizens’ lives by utilizing the logic of paternalism. They reasoned that such laws protected those without direct access to state power—which had the ultimate effect of further entrenching the power of white, male elites. 10 Paternalism, directed toward citizens in general and African Americans specifically, played a large role in Virginia’s passage of the 1922 censorship statute. According to historian J. Douglas Smith,
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